Seems to me that princessofg asked about this not too long ago. I couldn't find the post, but think it was in the last several months.

That's all I've got. :)

I can think of two possibilities. In all those thousands of addresses, some of those gates must have been lost, moved or otherwise rendered inactive or inaccessible. That being the case, he might have just had the misfortune of dialing missing, blocked or *busy* gates. The fact that some gates are on ships show that the Goa'uld have been moving them around. Ra's Rolodex was probably just somewhat out of date. I assume that even after they accounted for stellar drift, they still couldn't get a lock on some of the addresses.

The other possibility is that there was something wrong with the Abydos DHD. Might even have been altered by Ra to only allow connection between certain worlds. *shrug* Just a thought. It certainly seems like a reasonable security precaution for a slave planet left alone without a garrison.

Bad Control Crystal?

I honestly can't think of a technical reason, because you're right, the correlative updates kind of rules that out. I guess you could say Daniel was just incredibly unlucky and kept trying to dial gates that had been buried/destroyed, but I don't know if I would believe that. Have they ever said on the show what percentage of the addresses they dial actually lead to working gates? Because from the show it seems most of the gates are still functional, but it could be that in "real life" they only get a hit once every ten or twenty or more times?

I like the idea of Ra separating out his own little network. As for Apophis, wasn't he busy taking over Ra's domain at the beginning of the series and abducting Ra's former subjects? Which is why he hit both Abydos and Earth while looking for hosts. So you could just assume that he also knew how Ra's personal gate network functioned, or that he was able to reconnect all the gates back into the main network.

Or you could just say Daniel lied. :)

Oh god, we spent weeks on this and then it morphed and then I think I forgot to reply and it was abandoned. You still have the link to those (that?) posts?

What are the chances that he only tried gates that had been destroyed or otherwise blocked? ie the way that Daniel told the Abydonians to do when he went back to Earth?

I'm pretty sure it was April ish time. And it might have been 06. Maybe 05.

I think it hinges on the number of addresses he tried and how many times he dialed the addresses.

Exactly what I thought. And then I started wondering whether he had a schedule, and how much time exactly he spent at the dig, because Dr Jackson? Tons of time. Newly married Daniel? I'm thinking not so much. If he was being newly married Daniel, I can actually see him not retrying addresses - he'd know that he only had a limited time with the gate, so he'd try try others that might work, rather than ones he 'knows' don't work. Also, when did they realise that a gate could be blocked? Because if Daniel didn't know this, then he'd never re-try a gate. (Although, as someone else mentioned, he must have considered the fact that he could be getting an engaged tone...

*runs out of ramble-y content*

All of the above are plausible -- there could be a bad control crystal, limited dialing allowed, or he could have picked a few bad addresses. We don't know how many "bad dials" the SGC got, because it was always more interesting to see the addresses they could get through to. Considering the number of addresses that went bad through the course of the show, through storm, meteor strike, etc., it happens.

Or Daniel could have lied. He was mostly trying to create an alibi for Abydos not being the source of the attack on Earth. Though whether he had been lying to Sha're about the bad dials or whether he was lying to Jack, I'll wait for your fic to see. ;-)

Yeah, we have no idea how many bad 'gates we don't see in the show, so maybe Daniel just hit a bunch of them. Or maybe he only started dialing right before Jack came back, so he didn't get to dial that many.

Or you can just say he lied if it fits your plot. That's what author's notes are for. :P

Well, it stands to reason a good many of them were DOA/inaccessible. As tejas says, the Goa'uld have been shown moving them around wherever they need to. So there are a few that are probably out of contact as they're no longer on those planets, some were probably buried...

Some could even be blocked by something similar to Earth's 'iris', but those would connect. (eeek. There's a thought, Daniel would be without some kind of MALP to go through. He'd have no way of knowing what was on the other side.)

I forget, did the original team leave their MALP behind? I know they left the guns. Hrm. Bah, that can be handwaved. *G*

Daniel tried a grand total of three gate addresses before he got distracted by something shiny and cultural that kept him busy for the next year.

I like the bad DHD idea... I could get behind that.

I thought it had been established in that episode that planets had shifted out of alignment and the Abydos DHD was off the system or something and didn't keep up with the other planets that were still being automatically updated on the planet shift calculations. But Earth was the closest planet to Abydos and therefore hadn't shifted far enough out to be affected by the original calculations.

Maybe??

I don't really know what I'm talking about, but it sounded good in my head. :P

A few thoughts occur to me:

In CotG Daniel says that he STARTED his excavations near the town and it took him "about a month" to find the cartouche room.

(How long are Abydonian months? Their year is roughly a year and a half on Earth (from the placing of "Secrets" in season 2) and their days are 36 hours. A month (on Earth) was originally calulated as 1 lunar cycle but became fixed because lunar and solar rotations are not in synch, so it could be 5 or 6 weeks on Abydos.)

He then had to read, translate and figure out the cartouche codes (which probably would not have been immediate, even for him) not to mention UN-burying the gate and mapping the addresses in the night sky etc. The symbols we were shown are hieroglyphics - which he had to turn into Gate glyphs. That's got to be interesting, not to mention difficult.

This might not have given him much TIME to experiment with entering addresses between working out what he HAD and Jack coming back.

Especially as all this is while he is living in - and finding his place in - a subsistence community. IMHO it's not in Daniel's character to ignore his obligations to Sha're and the Abydonians - and I doubt he would have been as LOVED if he'd just destroyed Ra and then spent his year with the people "digging up old stuff"; especially old GOA'ULD stuff.

He may have tried SOME (he says that he had problems and figured the Gates were destroyed or buried etc) but that does not mean he tried 100s or 1000s.

If he and everyone else think the GOA'ULD created the Gate network, would anyone (least of all Sha're) have been happy with him just punching in random addresses to see what happens? Ra's dead, but what about his Jaffa? What about what (who?) else might be out there?

And why have a 36 guard duty on the Gate unless he WAS scared about what might come through?

The thousands of years since the cartouche addresses were logged gives plenty of time for the effects of earthquakes, volcanoes and meteors to bury lots of Gates, not to mention the effects of any other revolts, or other human actions. (Or Goa'uld actions, such as putting the Gate in a ship.)

As others have stated it's also possible that Abydos as a Point of Origin only WORKS to a limited number of addresses.

I have to ask myself, even if he ever HAD got a seventh chevron lock and a stable wormhole, would he have gone through? Without a MALP he has no idea what could be on the other side: we've seen Gates underwater and in frozen wastes. To all intents and purposes he has a PLACE on Abydos. A home. A family. A wife whom he loves. Would Daniel give that up to step through into the unknown - or risk Sha're or his friends stepping through with him?

He might not have the same intellectual pursuits as on Earth... but would he - COULD he - have just turned his back on Abydos and the Abdonians without the impetus of Jack, Apophis and Sha're's abduction?

Not bearing to be able to cover the Gate up again is a far cry from desperately trying addresses every day for a year.

Yes, Daniel's a genius. But on Abydos he did not have the tonne of research materials that we usual see him using in translation work.

(After "Fire and Water" I always wondered how his Abydos journal came back to Earth. In FiaD he says that Sha're saw him writing in his journal, so it went through the Gate with him... but where was it when he came back from Abydos? Did he keep it tucked under his robes somewhere everyday? Pressed against his heart? Why would he not leave it in his tent? Did he have a photo of his parents tucked in the back? Or did he keep it close for another reason?)

I'm glad I could help with the idea about what ELSE Daniel was doing on Abydos. We know he wasn't GREAT at grinding flour, what about shearing mastadge wool for weaving? MILKING a mastadge? Butchering a mastadge?

Since he knows something about delivering babies, did he try to educate Abydonian midwives in an attempt to make childbirth safer? I've always thought that an important use of the hard alcohol he introduced (?) would be as an antiseptic. There's SO MUCH one can do with Daniel's life on Abydos. :D

It's interesting - you're OBVIOUSLY in the process of planning/writing a pre-CotG fic (a Daniel/Sha're fic? Please?) but... thinking about this on YOUR account has set my own fic-bunnies bouncing.

I don't know whether to wait until your fic comes out and then see if my ideas are sufficiently different to warrant my trying to write this fic, or just WRITE. (You probably know already that I'm nervous enough anyway of fic writing in the SG-1 fandom.) *frets*

I suppose it depends on whether you plan to HAVE Daniel walk through and then get reamed out by EVERYONE when he comes home. lol

I'm sorry, this is WAY off topic, but did you get the email I sent you a few days ago?

K, just making sure so you knew I didn't ignore your comment. ;)

I remember a commentary where they copped it up to a mystery of sci fi. And then continued on saying that it was a f*up but it worked for the story so they kept it in.

I always got the feeling that they just never hit the right combinations. I mean, wasn't the SGC poking for years trying to find one and it never worked?

The SGC's problem was also that they were randomly dialing glyphs, and only a few hundred thousand combinations actually point to a planet. It wasn't until Daniel gave them the "address book" from the cartouche that they could focus on addresses that were known to get you somewhere. Though they still did random dialing every so often, which would be a way to get to Ancient planets Apophis hadn't written down for whatever reason.

Just found this, so chiming in a bit late. :)

First of all, you can very easily suggest that Daniel lied - to keep Abydos free of Earth influence while they did their own exploring, or whatever. It's vague enough here to leave lots of leeway for fanfic, yay!

princessofg had a great post on this a few months back, and in the discussions back and forth, we came up with something that sort of makes sense:

We learn in S7 that the Stargates are correlated via their DHDs, right? So that means that a Stargate needs to periodically connect with another Stargate with a DHD in order to get the latest stellar drift patch downloaded to its DHD and stay current.

Earth - and Abydos - have been out of the loop for 5,000 years. We see that Ra doesn't bother with the Gate - he prefers to travel by ship - so in those 5 millennia, both Earth and Abydos have missed out on all the upgrades. The two Gates can still connect because they're close enough to avoid the stellar drift problem, but they can't connect with any Stargate that needs compensation for the stellar drift over the years.

When the Stargate opened to Abydos in the movie, the DHD had nothing to connect to, since there was no DHD on Earth's side of the wormhole. So that didn't help. It wasn't until Apophis dialed into Abydos from a Stargate with a working DHD that the Abydon DHD finally got the stellar drift patches. With the connection to the Chulakian DHD, the Abydon DHD downloaded all the necessary upgrades all at once. That's why Apophis was able to leave Abydos instead of banging away in futile frustration. And if Daniel had tried any of the addresses after the Abydon DHD got the new correlations, he could've connected, too.

...That was our handwave, anyway. But as I said, feel free to say that Daniel lied. And I look forward to the fic when it's finished! :)

I figure it's just because he hadn't reached one that worked yet -- of the millions of combinations, how many actually go to planets? (But of course, Daniel may have lied if it works for your story.)

Then break out the soap. :)

He may not have been able to connect because he didn't think about the 'drift' over time until he and Sam technobabbled together in Children of the Gods. That's why she couldn't get any to work from Earth either, until they figured it out and she adjusted their calculating computer to account for 10,000 years of drift.
bren